A couple of weeks ago I talked to a co-worker who is responsible for selling VMware licenses and other VMware related stuff. As a VMware partner it isn’t always easy to manage the licenses for customers nor selling or upgrading their licenses if they bought them from another partner in the past.

A lot of the times multiple people register VMware licenses. For example, if I am the person that has to request or register licenses I probably will do it with my own VMware account. If I leave the company the licenses still are connected to me as a person. I know you can use a general account and register your licenses with that, but that goes against anything I ever learnt about security and identity management.

If you already have licenses there is also no easy way to ‘push’ them to another account, for example a general account. You can do this through the support desk, but takes all kinds of effort.

From a viewpoint of the license admininstrator it’s hard to keep track of all licenses that a company has for VMware products.

What I would like to see is a licensing portal with the following characteristics:

You can register a company that becomes owner of the licenses it buys

You can register as an employee for that company

As a employee you register licenses for your company or for personal use

Employees have the possibility to ‘push’ licenses from personal to corporate

If you buy licenses with your partner you give your corporate ID so that any new licenses or grant numbers are placed under your company

As a license admininstrator you can grant persons or partners the opportunity to view your licenses

Not that I want to make VMware the problem owner, but it would definitely make the whole job of license management a lot easier in my opinion.

By the way: Just do a search and replace of VMware by any other product vendor and I think my points are still valid.

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Anne Jan Elsinga

Anne Jan Elsinga is a Technical Account Manager for VMware. In the past he worked as presales and technical consultancy and architecture for several systems integrators. From 2009 until 2017 he was awarded with the VMware vExpert status. In the night time he dances latin, ballroom and salsa and he also discovered the pleasure of diving and woodworking. Recently he started blogging about smart homes and comfort in general.